My Face Gives Me Away

It arrives before you have decided anything.

Somebody says your name in a meeting. Somebody looks up as you come through a door. A shop assistant asks a perfectly ordinary question, and there is a heat coming up your neck before a single thought has formed, and by the time you notice it, it is already visible.

And then the second thing happens, which is worse than the first thing, and which nobody talks about.

You become aware that it is visible. And the awareness makes it stronger. And knowing that the awareness makes it stronger makes it stronger again, and inside about four seconds a small physical event has become a loop that you cannot get out of from the inside.

I have sat with a great many people in quiet places and I want to say something plainly at the start.

That flush is not a character flaw. It is not shyness, it is not a failure of confidence, and it is certainly not something you are doing.

It is a body, doing a thing bodies do, at the wrong moment and with no permission asked. That is all it has ever been, and a body doing that deserves care rather than correction.

But the flush is not what I want to spend our time on, because the flush lasts about ninety seconds and the thing built on top of it has lasted twenty years.

The building around it

Here is what I would like counted, because I do not think it ever has been.

Think of the rooms.

The ones left early. The ones never entered. The times somebody else answered because answering meant everybody turning around. The job that went unapplied for because of the interview. The birthday skipped because of the moment they sing.

None of that is the flush. All of that is architecture, built carefully over two decades to make sure that a ninety second physical event happens as rarely as possible.

And the architecture works. That is why it is still there. It has been genuinely effective at reducing the number of occasions, and it has cost you rooms, which nobody has ever added up alongside it.

You are living inside a structure built to prevent something that lasts ninety seconds, and it has never once been the flush that was taking the rooms. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman the size of a building she put up without noticing, and 2 Timothy 1 names what God did not give and what He gave instead.

And here is the quiet cruelty in it, which is not aimed at you by anybody.

The architecture teaches. Every avoided room is a small lesson that the room was dangerous, and the lesson accumulates, and after twenty years the lesson feels like knowledge about the world rather than a conclusion drawn from a habit.

You have not been avoiding rooms because they are dangerous. The rooms have come to feel dangerous because you have been avoiding them.

You are holding a conclusion your own avoidance produced, and the rooms have never once given you the evidence for it. Scripture in 2 Timothy 1 says God has not given us the spirit of fear, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a body's reflex from a woman's identity.

Not the spirit of fear

Paul writes a line to a young man that gets quoted a great deal and misapplied nearly as often.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7, King James Version)

Now I want to handle this carefully, because badly preached this verse becomes a stick.

It does not say you should not feel afraid. It does not say a flush is a sin, and it does not say a nervous system is a spiritual condition. Anybody who uses that verse to tell a woman that her body's reflex is a failure of faith has put a burden on her that Paul never put on Timothy.

Read what it actually says, which is about what was given.

There is a spirit of fear, and it is not the one God handed out. What He handed out was power, and love, and a sound mind. So whatever is happening in your neck at four seconds past somebody saying your name, it did not come from Him and it is not your allocation.

You are carrying something that was never issued to you, and the flush has never once been a description of what God actually gave. It is written in 2 Timothy 1 that God gave power and love and a sound mind, and the Holy Spirit is the one who returns to a woman the things on that list.

And look at the third item, because it is the one nobody preaches.

A sound mind. Which in that sentence means a mind that works properly, that is not turned in on itself, that is not running a loop about its own running.

That is exactly the second thing that happens in the shop. Not the heat. The mind watching the heat and reporting on the heat and making the heat worse. A sound mind is the direct opposite of that particular loop, and it is on the list of things given.

You are given a mind that is not required to watch itself, and the loop has never once been part of the allocation. The Spirit of God is what breaks a mind out of reporting on its own body, and the written word says power, and love, and a sound mind.

Four extra minutes

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately not about the flush at all.

This week, stay in one room for four extra minutes after the point where you would normally have left.

That is the whole thing. Not speak up. Not stand in the middle. Not be comfortable. Stay four minutes longer than the architecture says.

There are reasons it is four and not forty. Four minutes is inside what you can actually do, and the flush is usually over inside two, which means the four minutes will mostly be spent on the far side of it, in a room, still standing, with nothing terrible having happened.

You are able to be on the far side of ninety seconds in company, and no room has ever once turned out to be what the leaving assumed. 2 Timothy 1:7 says God gave power and love and a sound mind, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing there at minute three.

That is the whole point. The far side of one, in company, is almost unvisited territory, because leaving has always come first.

Staying is a form of care and not a piece of bravery. And do not manage anything while the four minutes run. Do not explain, do not make a joke about it, do not touch your neck, and do not go to the bathroom to check. Stand there and let a body do what a body does and let it finish.

You are able to still be in the room when it finishes, and nobody has ever once been given a report on what a face did for ninety seconds. The written word in 2 Timothy 1 puts power and love and a sound mind on the list of what was given, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a woman standing in a room four minutes longer than usual.